november 2019

                         (i)

...I need to have some inhuman solitude

to see beyond solitude

a greater reach to turn obscurity

into something I can touch

a malleable unknown

or those stanzas I once chiselled into a mountain side

to strike at memory

at the irreconcilable totality of injustice

for there is no amnesty

no golden fleece, no covenant

no-one to bring back

the righteous among the nations

what there are, instead, are angels

engorged by fire

their throats fountains of blue, cold flames

the new solitude no-one can touch

these embers of the righteous

still clutching extinction

and what, if anything, I might have reached

may or may not be human...

                            (ii)

...like leaves, like exfoliated souls that fall and fall

never once reaching solid ground

gravity waits

austerity waits

and only now do the clouds begin their monologue

prayers evaporating back into nothing

it is the chaos of some endless vertigo

where bones are obsolete

and the fall of water is reversed

the world falling upwards

dissolving the sky

this dizzying mismatch of words

the earth hurtling through our minds

scattering the truth

disintegrating souls back into nothing

austere yet still explosive

heavy yet still somehow senseless

this endgame, this shockwave

reaching the clouds

and shattering...

                             (iii)

...tell me of the mystery maker

the effigy with perfect eyes

the charlatan who keeps hiding

the truth of all true things

who draws from his pockets

this new age of reasoned deception

and tell me too about the wiseacre

the one who twists this silvery wax from his ears

and of the dancing sorcerer and juggler

whose love is said to glisten with magic

or is it those two enchanters

whose hands and feet have grown from trees

the intellect and the vagabond

is it they who fashion

the reality of all real things

or is it, instead, this multiplicity of extremes

that pushes so many tongues

into so many mouths

in this age of spells

this age of perfect eyes

the effigy hiding either side of life...